"Opposition is true friendship."
--William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
"that the vanishing point might be on every word."
--Lyn Hejinian, "Gertrude Stein: Two Lectures"

WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE of that loose collective enterprise, which
sprang up in the aftermath of the sixties, known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Writing? To answer this question I will be taking, initially, a somewhat
oblique route. And I shall assume an agreement on several important
social and political matters: first, that the United States, following
the Second World War, assumed definitive leadership of a capitalist
empire; second, that its position of leadership generated a network of
internal social contradictions which persist to this day (as imperialist
demands collide with American traditions of isolationism and
revolutionary nationalism); third, that this postwar period has been
characterized at the international level by an extended Cold War shadowed
by the threat of a global catastrophe, whether deliberate or accidental.
Whatever one's political allegiances, these truths, surely, we hold as
self-evident.

Postwar American poetry is deployed within that general arena, and to the
degree that it is "political" at all, it reflects and responds to that
set of overriding circumstances. In my view the period up to the present
ought to be seen as having two phases. The first phase stretches from
about 1946 (when Lord Weary's Castle appeared) to 1973 (when Lowell
capped his career with the publication of History). This period is
dominated by a conflict between various lines of traditional poetry, on
the one hand, and the countering urgencies of the "New American Poetry"
on the other. In the diversity of this last group Donald Allen argued
for a unifying "characteristic": "a total rejection of all those
qualities typical of academic verse."

Of course, this representation of the conflict between "tradition" and
"innovation" obscures nearly as much as it clarifies. The New American
poets were, in general, much more inclined to experimentalism than were
writers like Wilbur, Hecht, Simpson, or Justice. But Allen's declaration
can easily conceal the academic and literary characteristics of the

innovators. Duncan and Olson, for example, key figures in the New
American Poetry, can hardly not be called "literary" or even "academic"
poets. If they opened certain new areas in the field of poetic style, no
less could and has been said of Robert Lowell, even in his early work.
And if Frank O'Hara seems the antithesis of academic work, Ashbery is, in
his own way, its epitome. Yet both appear in Allen's New American Poetry
anthology. Moreover, who can say, between O'Hara and Ashbery, which is
the more innovative of the two, so different are their styles of
experimentation.

The issue here is not stylistic, however, but ideological and ultimately
political. We can see this more clearly if we recall that this
unpolitical style of American writing between 1946 and 1973 mistakably
liberal-left. This is as true, in general, for the traditionalists as it
is for the innovators.

If we compare the period 1946-1973 with the years since, many of the same
kinds of literary conflicts seem to persist. Nevertheless, this most
recent period is sharply distinguished from the earlier one by one
momentous difference: the dramatic shift to the political right which has
taken place following the Vietnam War. Like every other part of society,
The literary world registered these new social circumstances.
Specifically, two new lines of work began to make their presence felt.
The first of these might be called personal (not confessional) or
localized verse, though Robert von Hallberg has called it the poetry of
the suburbs. It is marked stylistically by a moderated surface urbanity
and substantively by an attempt to define "social" and "political" within
a limited, even a personal, horizon. Furthermore, one observes in this
work a renewed interest in narrative forms--a significant stylistic
inclination, as we shall see more clearly in a moment. Robert Pinsky is
perhaps the most conspicuous practitioner, and promoter, of this poetic
mode, but it includes a large and heteronomous group of other, chiefly
academic poets. Its spokesmen are Richard Howard, Helen Vendler,
and--most recently--von Hallberg. "The poetry I admire [from the last
forty years]," von Hallberg says, "is fairly spoken of as one of
accommodation rather than opposition." [For more on Pinsky, see terza rima.]

The other line of work is L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing. Here a conscious
attempt has been made to marry the work of the New American Poetry of the
fifties with the poststructural work of the late sixties and seventies. As
Frost, Yeats, Auden, and Stevens are the "precursors" of the poets of
accommodation, Pound, Stein, and Zukofsky stand behind the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers. Oppositional politics are a paramount concern,
and the work stands in the sharpest relief, stylistically, to the poetry
of accommodation.

In a sense, the period from 1973 to the present appears to repeat the
central struggle of 1946-1973 between the "academics" and the "New
American Writers." L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing is distinctively experimental,
while poets like Robert Pinsky, Louise Gliick, and John Hollander are
traditionalists; and whereas the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers are almost all
situated--economically and institutionally--outside the academy, their
counterparts, critics, and poets alike--occupy important scholastic
positions. The difference between pre- and post-1973 American poetry lies in
the extremity of the ideological gap which separates the traditionalists
from the innovators in the later period. As will be very clear from the
discussion that follows, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers typically emphasize their
oppositional politics in ways that the New American Poets did not. The
latter were more socially disaffected than politically opposed.

The two divergent lines in American poetry since 1973 are usefully
contrasted in terms of the shape of John Ashbery's career and their
relation to it. Throughout the seventies and even into the eighties,
Ashbery has been the single most influential figure in American poetry.
But there are certainly two Ashberys to choose from. For L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
writers, all of his work should be read out of--by means of--the
experimental projects developed from The Tennis Court Oath (1962) to
Three Poems (1972). Not that he has ceased to write important work
since, but in those early years his innovative stylistic repertoire was
fully deployed. Indeed, Ashbery's style--established in the sixties--has
come to seem an early example of a postmodem sensibility. As such, it
was (properly) taken as a swerve away from the poetries of the fifties
and sixties--a presage of things to come.

The problem, however, is the political significance of Ashbery's
postmodern stance. The heated controversy which has developed around
the idea of the postmodern--is it or is it not a reactionary social
phenomenon?--throws the problem of Ashbery's work into sharp relief. His
unmistakable style has been read as the poetic equivalent of a
deconstructive mode; yet deconstruction in America, though seen in many
traditional quarters as a socially subversive movement, has been centered
in the Yale school, which has never made any effort to develop or
practice an oppositional politics. A similar type of "nonpolitics" is
discernible throughout Ashbery's career--even as his work has been used by
many younger writers whose oppositional politics are clear. But Ashbery
himself has not exploited his own work's "oppositional" features and
potentialities; and in the period from 1973 to the present his work has
moved instead along lines that parallel the suburban and personal
interests of poets like Pinsky, James McMichael, and Turner Cassity (for
example, Ashbery's Vermont Notebook (1975), Houseboat Days [1977], and As
We Know [1979]).

Ashbery's avoidance of a conscious political position defines the style
of his postmodern address. Not without reason has his work been
canonized in academic discourse about contemporary poetry. As earlier
Lowell became the exegetical focus of high/late New Critical discourse,
Ashbery has become the contemporary touchstone for deconstructive
analysis. What we confront here, however, is not so much an issue of
poetic style or poetic quality as it is a problem in ideology the kinds of
cultural ideas that are to be propagated through that crucial ideological
apparatus, the academy. In postmodern work we become aware of the many
crises of stability and centeredness which an imperial culture like our
own--attempting to hold control over so much, and such widely dispersed,
human material--inevitably has to deal with. The response to such a
situation may be either a contestatory or an accommodational one; it may
move to oppose and change such circumstances, or it may take them as
given and reflect, or reflect upon, their operations.

"'The test of a 'politics of poetry,'" Barrett Watten has observed, "is
in the entry of poetry into the world in a political way." Watten has
been a prominent L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writer for some time, so for him
"politics" means "opposition" rather than "accommodation." What we must
recognize is that both types of writing, whether contestatory or
accommodating, are political in character and represent a certain type of
political stance toward life in 'imperialist America.' Furthermore, from
the vantage of a writer like Watten, the poetries of accommodation of the
seventies represent a retreat from the critical responsibilities of art,
and perhaps even an active celebration properly hedged or refined--of
immediate social and political circumstances.

One cannot write about these matters neutrally. Neutrality here in fact
is a choice of the position of accommodation. And while I find much to
admire in that kind of poetry, I think that by far the most important
work is now being done elsewhere in American writing. Nor does the
importance of that work lie solely in its "oppositional" politics. The
most innovative work stylistically is now to be traced in the journals,
chapbooks, pamphlets, and--increasingly--the books of various poets
associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing. The eventuality is hardly a
surprising one, for this work has been actively forging, over the past
ten or fifteen years, writing procedures which seek a comprehensive
account of the American experience during that period.

Of course, much of this work is weak, some of it is trivial, and a great
deal has only a formal or aesthetic significance, despite its political
urgencies. My interest here, however, is not in such matters. Rather,
what I want to indicate is the kind of intervention L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E work
typically seeks to make--how it tries to enter the world in a political
way, and what it means to carry out through that entrance.

In the eyes of eternity--if eternity is interested in art--Wordsworth and
Blake will each take their appropriate place, and later ages will find in
each various resources appropriate to a later moment. But between 1789
and 18l5 the work of Wordsworth and Blake entered the world very

McGann on
the importance of Ashbery:

Throughout the seventies and even into
the eighties, Ashbery has been the single most influential figure in
American poetry. But there
are certainly two Ashberys to choose from. For L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
writers, all of his work
should be read out of--by means of--the experimental projects
developed from The Tennis
Court Oath (1962) to Three Poems (1972). Not that he has ceased to
write important work since,
but in those early years his innovative stylistic repertoire was
fully deployed. Indeed, Ashbery's
style--established in the sixties--has come to seem an early example
of a postmodem sensibility.
As such, it was (properly) taken as a swerve away from the poetries
of the fifties and sixties--a
presage of things to come.

differently, and their art stood for two correspondingly different
"politics of poetry." Each is part of the same cultural structure, but
each imagined that culture--its past, present, and future alike--in
radically different ways. When they produced their work they were
carrying out a struggle of the imagination, ultimately a social and
political struggle. just so is all writing engaged in immediate disputes
that have broad and long social implications--in contests of the present
for the resources of the past and the possibilities of the future. And
we too have choices to make. Histories of our moment are currently being
written by various poets, and within those histories alternative
histories of poetry are being carried out. Because I believe that the
history which is L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing is extremely important, I want
to indicate here, in a brief and polemical way, the context and import of
its ventures.

I SHALL BEGIN this inquiry at a tangent, by looking at a passage from a
recent essay by Richard Rorty. The essay as such has nothing
to do with contemporary American poetry.

There are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try, by
placing their lives in a large context, to give sense to those lives.
The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community.
This community may be the actual historical one in which they live, or
another actual one, distant in time or place, or a quite imaginary one...
The second way is to describe themselves as standing in immediate
relation to a nonhuman reality. This relation is immediate in the sense
that it does not derive from a relation between such a reality and their
tribe, or their nation, or their imagined band of comrades. I shall say
that stories of the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity and
objectivity.'

Rorty, as we know, is committed to "stories" of what he calls
"solidarity"--"pragmatistic" stories of the here and now. Or we should
rather say that he reads all the stories that interest him out of the
framework of his "cultural peers," the group he also calls "postmodern
bourgeois intellectuals." This is the locus of his allegiances and
conscious "solidarity." Though I shall later have some comments on
Rorty's ideas about postmodernity, I must first call attention to the
privilege Rorty gives to narrative itself. Rorty assumes--the passage is,
in this respect, typical of all his work--that "human being" is
fundamentally a social rather than a rational function. He goes on to
say that we "give sense to" our human being in only two communicative
forms. This thought is striking enough, but even more so is the idea
that both of these forms are narrative ones.

As Michel de Certeau and others have pointed out, narrative is a form of
continuity; as such, its deployment in discourse is a way of legitimating
established forms of social order, as well as the very idea of such
established forms. Within discourse structures, critical alternatives
to the orders of narrativity characteristically emerge from various types
of nonnarrative and antinarrative. Such forms have grown especially
prominent in the discourses of postmodernism. As we shall see more
particularly in a moment, however, while both nonnarratives and
antinarratives move counter to regularized, normative, and
"accommodating" orders, they exemplify distinct forms of discourse.
Antinarrative is problematic, ironical, and fundamentally a satiric
discursive procedure. It engages a dialectic, and its critical function
is completed in a structure of antithesis, which may include the double
irony of a self-antithesis. Nonnarratives, on the other hand, do not
issue calls for change and alterity; they embody in themselves some form
of cultural difference. To adapt (and secularize) the terminology of
Blake, nonnarrative is the "contrary" (rather than the negation) of
narrativity. Its antithesis to narrative is but one dimension of a more
comprehensively imagined program based in the codes of an alternative set
of solidarities. Byron's Don Juan is one type of antinarrative and
Blake's Milton is another type. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, on the
other hand, is decidedly nonnarrative.

The special relevance of nonnarrative and antinarrative lies within the
horizon of postmodernism, when such forms (and their correspondent
terminologies) began to be elaborated. Nevertheless, because
nonnarrative and antinarrative were not contemporary inventions, their
presence in certain previous literary works can help to define their
special currencies. Consider antinarratives, for example, whose
structures depend upon, reflect, and thereby maintain the forms of
narrative continuity which they bring under critical examination. The
digressive structure of Don Juan, for example, is intimately connected to
the fate of that poem's narrative--which is, fundamentally, the
recollective narrative of Byron's own life told via several displaced and
putatively fictive narratives involving the poem's hero Don Juan.
Similarly, Blake's Milton is a critical examination of English history
between approximately 1640 and 1810. That history is presented as a
system which replicates itself in its various subsystems (for example,
the events of Milton's life, the events of Blake's). Furthermore, these
histories are placed within the context of the more comprehensive
narrative of human history as set forth in the redemptive mythos of
Jewish-Christian polemics. The critique of history in Milton appears as
a secret narrative moving antithetically to the known and apparent
narrative: Blake represents this structure as a pair of cogged wheels,
with the destructive wheel (of nature) turning in one direction, and the
redemptive wheel (of art)--attached to it--turning in the other. That
image itself suggests the intimacy of the relation between narrative and
antinarrative.

Nonnarrative is different--for example, Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and
Hell." Among all of Blake's works it most closely resembles the Songs of
Innocence and of Experience in terms of both its ideas and its form.
Both works explore the significance of what Blake calls "contraries."
Furthermore, both are collections of diverse materials anthologized
structures where the relations between the parts are not determined by
narrativities. This odd character of the "Marriage" in particular is
underscored in several ways. The work opens with an "Argument," which
ought, by poetic convention, to be a brief summary of the work to follow.
But the "Argument" is a small narrativized unit whose relation to the
rest of the "Marriage" can only be arranged by the reader's ingenuity in
drawing different kinds of verbal and tropical analogies of the
"Argument" (and parts of it) with other parts and pieces of the work.
The "Marriage" contains as well a number of other brief narrativized
units, but all are self-contained; their interrelations, once again, have to be
consciously constructed because the work as a whole is not organized as a
narrative.

This fact about the internal form of the work is emphasized by the
heterogeneity of the particular writing-units. Some are narrativized,
one is a collection of proverbs, and four others are expository
presentations of different kinds of ideas. Furthermore, the subject
matter taken up in these different textual units is equally heteronomous.
The "Argument" (plate z) is a spare allegorical narrative based in the
biblical mythos; the "Song of Liberty" (plates 25-27), also narrativized,
is a polyglot piece whose primary location is in contemporary history;
and the other narrative units (for example, plates i 2.-13, 15 and the
two narratives embedded in plates 7- 3) are equally diverse with respect
to type and subject matters. The differentiating inertia of the
"Marriage" operates as well within the specific textual units. Plates
12-13, for example, narrate a personal anecdote, but the location of the
event--in some kind of spiritual hyperspace--forces a reorientation of certain
fundamental categories of thought (spatial, temporal, social).

Finally, one must observe the variable order of the text as a whole. Most
copies of the "Marriage" are arranged in the sequence plates 1-27, but
copies E and G deploy perfectly acceptable alternative orders, and copy G
was in fact foliated by Blake himself. The shifting plates are 4, 14,
and 15, which are so moved that two other orderings are created for the
work. One should note here that a similar indeterminacy of textual
relations is found throughout Blake's work: no copy of the Songs has an
order which corresponds to that of any other copy; and variations are the
rule in almost all of his engraved works. There is no doubt that these
variances in sequencing are deliberate, and there is every reason to
think that he was encouraged to this kind of textual experimentation by
recent biblical and classical scholarship.

Whatever the order of this wild diversity of material, then, it is
clearly not a narratological one. Indeed, narrativity is
short-circuited from the moment that the reading process is spatialized as
a field of illuminated printing. It is not simply that the "text" is
illustrated or illuminated; rather, the verbal discourse evolves as a set
of images, decorations, and pictures. To say that one "reads" Blake's
works is to invoke a metaphor, as one does when one speaks of "reading" a
painting. Of course, if Blake's work is delivered over to us simply in
typographical forms we are likely to end up as nonmetaphoric "readers" of
the "texts." This commonly happens when Blake is "taught," but it is a
type of misreading--an abstracted form--which has nothing to recommend it
as an imaginative activity. In short, Blake ought to be "read" in
facsimile.

What, then is the order which pervades a work like the "Marriage?" Blake
called it the order of Imagination-the order generated through the
faculty or process which discovers previously unapprehended relations of
things. The most striking aspect of the highly differentiated material
in the "Marriage" is that it encourages the reader to draw out unusual
substantive and grammatological relationships which convention will
normally miss or avoid. Antinarrative calls those conventions into
question and develops the premonitory conditions for imaginative
activity. Indeed, antinarrative frequently generates imaginative
localities and incommensurate particulars which escape the imperialism of
narrativity. But nonnarrative alone wifl establish, among the kingdoms
and principalities of narrative, the proper world of what Blake called
Imagination.

Once again we must ask, however, what is the order of that world? An
answer may be glimpsed if we reflect for a moment on one of the most
striking variations in the plate sequencing. Plate 15 (the Printing
House in Hell episode) comes last in copy E of the "Marriage," immediately
after the "Song of Liberty," which is the work's traditional conclusion.
This dramatic placement clearly calls attention not merely to the work's
own productive processes, but to the satanic view of what all knowledge,
imaginative or otherwise, must be: mediated language forms generated
through specific social--specific material and Institutional--processes.
In all copies of the "Marriage" the subject minently and recurrently of
Blake's own productive processes is protreated. This subject calls
attention to the inherently material and social character of imaginative
work. Placing plate 15 at the end is one way of giving such ideas
paramount and conclusive importance.

A poem like the "Marriage," then, urges us to see that the order of
nonnarrative is the order of production (as opposed to the orders of
reflection and reproduction). This order is emphasized in the "Marriage"
through the pervasive thematic of the printing and engraving proans and
modes of processes: the meaning of the "Marriage" 's means and modes
of production. It is, as one might say, "a poem about poetry," but not
about the "idea" of poetry. The "Marriage" is "about" poetry in the sense
that poetry is understood as a set of socially engaged material
practices. In the "Marriage" poetry "practices itself," poetry is carried
out; and this work of poetry as a productive social practice is
self-consciously brought before the attention of the "reader." This sort
of thing happens in Blake's work all the time--for example, in Jerusalem,
part of whose wit involves the understanding that Albion's "emanation" is
in literal truth the work Blake produces and calls Jerusalem.

This example of Blake is a useful point of departure for considering a
large and important body of contemporary writing in which antinarrative
and nonnarrative figure prominently. Blake is useful not merely because
his example is familiar, but perhaps even more because his is a
problematic case. In the "Marriage" a redemptive myth is essayed which is
based in forms of creation rather than forms of atonement. Within the
general framework of judeo-Christian culture, a production-based
redemptive order is unusual, and extremely difficult to maintain.
Blake's work is most emphatically carried out within a judeo-Christian
culture, and although the work moves at a strange diagonal to that
culture, it never wholly escapes its gravitational field. Atonement,
rather than creation, is a form of thought--a mode of action--which recurs
throughout the work, most prominently, I suppose, in Milton and
Jerusalem. To the extent that Blake is interested in creation rather
than redemption, he is hostile to the theory of atonement. In the end
Blake arrived at a compromise: he rejected traditional theory of atonement,
but he embraced a heterodox theory which held, essentially, that a
general redemptive scheme would emerge through the practice of continuous
self-atonement.

IN SO FAR AS WORKS like the "Songs" and "Marriage" are nonnarratives which
do not involve themselves in forms of atonement, they resemble various kinds
of poststructural discourse, in particular the work now commonly known as
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing. Since antinarrative and nonnarrative forms
abound in this work, it exemplifies a significant strand of postmodernist
writing. But unlike certain other forms of postmodernism--prototypically
the academic postmodernism associated with the Yale school, on the one
hand, and with Richard Rorty on the other--L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing
typically deploys a consciously antithetical political content. It
situates itself, therefore, to the left of Rorty's "postmodern bourgeois
intellectuals."

Though an extraordinarily diverse group, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers are
involved with writing projects which fracture the surface regularities of
the written text and which interrupt conventional reading processes.
Thus Richard Foreman writes a theoretical essay carrying the imperative
title "Trying to be Centered ... On the Circumference. If the Word
of God issues from that famous circle whose center is everywhere and
whose circumference is nowhere, these new words come from a circle of
human writers whose circumference is everywhere and whose center is
nowhere. Abigail Child declares, in an aphoristic manifesto, that the
poetic object is to set "UNITS OF UNMEANINGNESS INCORPORATED ANEW VS. A
COMMUNITY OF SLOGANEERS" (94). The sense is that poetry and writing
generally have been colonized by imperial forces, and that the power of
this monopoly has to be broken. The object of writing must be to set
language free, to return it from the domains of the abstract and the
conventional (the communities of SLOGANEERS, whose name today is Legion)
to a world of human beings and human uses.

The program of these writers, consequently, has a strong, usually an
explicit, social and political orientation. I want to leave that aside
for the moment, however, in order to concentrate on its more local and
even technical aspects: for example, on Tina Darragh's forms of
"procedural writing" which she adapts from the work of Francoise Ponge.
Darragh produces arrangements of textual forms--they are literally
unreadable, as is much other L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry--by selecting, via
an orderly but arbitrary plan, sequences of verbal materials that appear
on a single page of a dictionary. The point of this kind of operation
becomes very clear if we read a few of Bernadette Mayer's practical
writing injunctions as set forth in her mini-manual "Experiments":

Systematically derange the language, for example, write a work
consisting only of prepositional phrases, or, add a gerundive to every
line of an already existing piece of prose or poetry, etc.

Get a group of words (make a list or select at random); then form these
words (only) into a piece of writing--whatever the words allow. Let them
demand their own form, and/or: Use certain words in a set way, like, the
same word in every line, or in a certain place in every paragraph, etc.
Design words.

Write what cannot be written, for example, compose an index. (Read an
index as a poem).

Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial.

Consider word & letter as forms--the concretistic distortion of a
text, for example, too many o's or a multiplicity of thin letters (illftiii,
etc.)

Attempt to eliminate all connotation from a piece of writing & vice
versa.

The final injunction in Mayer's list of writing experiments is appropriately,
summarily, placed: "Work your ass off to change the language &
don't ever get famous" (83). Her message is clear: the celebrated
writing of her time appears in digestible and accepted forms; indeed, at
this time (at any time, one wonders?) fame, conventionality, and the
regularities of narrativized discourse are functionally related to
everything that must be judged unpoetical, inhuman, a failure--even
perhaps, a betrayal. To revive poetry, "to change the language," means
trying to "write what cannot be written," to produce what cannot be
"read" (an "index," a "multiplicity of thin letters")--in short, to
"derange the language" from its current (truly "deranged")
conventionalities.

Mayer's "Experiments" speak very clearly about a number of the most
important characteristics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing. In the first
place, writing is conceived as something that must be done rather than as
something that is to be interpreted. The vantage is Horatian rather than
Plotinian. The "meanings" sought after in this work are neither ideas

"systematically derange the language" -
Bernadette Mayer

which lie behind (prior to) the texts nor residues left over from their
operations. Meaning occurs as part of the process of writing--indeed, it
is the writing. Thus Charles Bernstein says of such poetry that it
"emphasizes its medium as being constructed ... designed, manipulated,
picked, programmed, organized" (39)--"Whatever gets written gets written
in a particular shape, uses a particular vocabulary & syntax, & a variety
of chosen techniques... Sometimes this process takes place intuitively
or unconsciously... Sometimes it is a very conscious process ... In
either case, various formal decisions are made & these decisions shape
the work"(43). This kind of statement--it appears repeatedly in the
manifestos of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing--argues that discourse, including
poetic discourse, is not meaning-referential but meaning constitutive.
Writing is an event, a praxis, and in our day one of its principal
operations involves the dismantling of the ideology, reified in so much
that passes for "writing" (the SLOGANEERS), that language which in this
context means producing and reproducing textsis an object, an icon. "The
signs of language ... are not ... mere structures," Bernstein says, "they
do not sit, deanimated, as symbols in a code, dummies for things of
nature they refer to" (41). We are to think of poetry as "making a path"
rather than "designing a garden" (39)--"Texts are themselves signifieds,
not mere signifiers. TEXT: it requires no hermeneusis for it is itself
one of itself" (34).

A second crucial feature of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E approach to poetry and
writing centers in its preoccupation with nonsense, unmeaning, and
fragmentation. These writers practice language experiments which
generate and promote such conditions. As readers, their approach is
archaeological. Their reviews and critical comments on poetry display
little concern with "Interpretation;" rather, they elucidate as it were
the behavior, the manners, the way of life that various kinds of writings
perform and live. When Alan Davies and Nick Piombino see poetry as a
locus of "Indeterminate intervals," they develop a method for
encountering and illuminating texts which they call "Field Reading. "
One recalls Tina Darragh's work with "procedural writing" whereby
the page of a dictionary is suddenly exposed as a field of strange and
unrecognized deposits--odd bits and pieces scattered across a surface
whose depths and layers and correspondence escape the notice of the
dictionary's ordinary users.

This archaeology of knowledge represents a deliberate intervention in and
through the processes of writing. Field reading and procedural writing
are stochastic immediate events that intervene with writing deposits,
equally stochastic, which are already situated. What is crucial to the
immediate acts of intervention, however, is that they are conscious of
their own relative status. These writers deploy an archaeology which
does not stand in an objective and superior relation to the fields they
are exploring. There is a "transmutative effect" (49) between writings
and readings, feedback loops that persist and expand their operations as
the random and the deliberate intersect in the dynamic field of language
use: "There's a place that you're going from and a place that you're
going to; to get to that place, that tracking, is as worthwhile as the
endpoint of going, because while you're going there you find other things
and those things are related to the final place; that helps to define
what it is when you get there. New combinations and connections are
experienced. In finding your locus you redefine it again each time,
systematically finding new coordinates."

This passage reminds us that, in the view of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing, the
time is always the present. Nevertheless, past and future are permanent
concerns of these writers, whose work would be travestied if it were
represented as the imperialism of the here and now, or the immediate
self. The textual activism that is promoted in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing
places the writer inside the writing process. The writer manipulates and
deploys his or her texts, but in so doing the writer is also,
necessarily, made subject to their inertia as well. "Texts read the
reader," Bruce Andrews observes (36), which means, in this program, that
they read the writer as well. The activist writer/reader, by operating
on and in texts, undergoes the limits and the significance of that
activism. As a consequence, meaning" emerges not as an appropriation
or institution of truth but as "the enabled incapacity to impose a usage"
(3 5). The program is conceived to reveal the power of writing and the
production of meaning as human, social, and limited in exact and
articulable ways. Indeed, it is designed to demonstrate and practice
such a conception.

Thus we can see the general context--political and stylistic alike within
which the antinarrative and nonnarrative procedures of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Writing are deployed. Narrativity is an especially problematic feature
of discourse, to these writers, because its structures lay down "stories"
which serve to limit and order the field of experience, in particular the
field of social and historical experience. Narrativity is, in this view,
an inherently conservative feature of discourse, and hence it is
undermined at every point. Charles Bernstein's poems, for example,
typically begin with an attack upon conventional "beginnings." In
traditional texts the "beginning" signals the text's sense of itself as a
"unitary document" within which "continuity is possible." Because the
fundamental codes of the reading procedure are established at every
beginning, Bernstein's poems typically start by throwing up barriers and
creating problems. His initiating codes are always antithetical, as we
see at the outset of one of his most astonishing poems, "For Love has
such a Spirit that if it is Portrayed it Dies":

Mass of van contemplation to intercede crush of plaster. Lots of loom:
"smoke out", merely complicated by the first time something and don't.
Long last, occurrence of bell, altitude, attitude of. The first, at this
moment, aimless, aims. To the point of inordinate asphalt-lecture,
entail. These hoops regard me suspiciously.(11)

From this apparently scattered set of texts one scarcely knows how to
proceed. We are at the outset of a "poem"--this much we know, from having
decoded other attendant bibliographical conventions and hence we assume
that "continuity is possible." Bernstein counts on that assumption and
then attacks it. To "go on" with this text means that the reader has
assented to the justice--the poetic justice of Bernstein's initial move.
And if we do in fact go on with his text, we will discover that
relationships and forms of order can be had only if they are actively
made by the reader. We will also discover that such relationships and
forms of order are multiple and that they shift from reader to reader and
from reading to reading. Continuities do not lie in wait for us, and the
idea that we should expect continuities is specifically rejected.

This is the antinarrative mode of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing and it is
Bernstein's most typical form of stylistic address. The nonnarrative
mode is perhaps best displayed in the elaborate forms of serialized
writing produced by Ron Silliman. This is how Tjanting begins:

Not this.
What then?
I started over & over. Not this.
Last week I wrote "the muscles in my palm so sore from
halving the rump roast I could barely grip the pen." What then? This
morning my lip is blisterd.
Of about to within which. Again & again I began. The gray light of day
fills the yellow room in a way wch is somber. Not this. Hot grease has
spilld on the stove top.
Nor that either. Last week I wrote "the muscle at thumb's root so taut
from carving that beef I thought it wld cramp." Not so. Would I begin?
This morning my lip is tender, disfigured. I sat in an old chair out
behind the anise. I could have gone about this some other way.

In an important essay, "Narrating Narration," on Silliman's work,
Bernstein points out that Silliman's nonnarratives consciously work
against "the deep slumber of chronology, causality, and false unity
(totalization)." (19) He elaborates this idea in a general comment which
might well serve as the basis for a particular exegesis of the passage I
just quoted: "Detail is cast upon detail, minute particular on minute
particular, adding up to an impossibility of commensurable narrative.
With every new sentence a new embarkation: not only is the angle changed,
and it's become a close-up, but the subject is switched. Yet maybe the
sound's the same, carries it through. Or like an interlocking chain: A
has a relation to B and B to C, but B and C have nothing in common
(series not essence)." (20) Silliman's text commits itself to the "Not
this," to a productivity that starts over and over again. But while the
work is clearly a processive text, its movement is not governed by a
narrativized totality. At the same time, if the work is oriented toward
"the future," toward "what comes next," it grounds itself in both the
present and the past: what it denominates, in its first two sentences, as
the "this" and then "then." The chief effect is a brilliant sense of
immediacy which is not, however, fixed or formalized. The text is
restless in its presentness restless in a presentness which at all points
vibrates with its relations to the past and its commitments to the
future. In fact, Silliman's energized presentation gradually shows that
the past and the future are themselves open to many possibilities. "I
could have gone about this some other way," he writes, and in that very
statement we observe a change of direction.

In a work like Tjanting language is carrying out--dramatizing certain
fundamental realities of social space and social relations. Silliman's
text is a vast trope of the human world. Events in the past continually
impinge upon the present and possibilities beyond the present: words and
phrases recur in slightly altered forms and circumstances, as do
syntactical forms, images, and sound patterns. As a consequence, we
confront time, or the sequence of eventualities, in a highly pressurized
state. The shifting forms of the repetitions open the textual field to
greater possibilities. They also locate startling
interventions in the text's immediate moments:

The yellow room has a sober hue. Each sentence accounts for its place.
Not this.

But perhaps most remarkable of all is the translation of the past that is
to say, earlier textualizations--out of this generational process.So,
while "earlier" textual forms appear in various "later" transforms, a
reciprocal transformative process operates backward, as it were, changing
the "earlier" texts within their memorial "later" constitutions. Thus in
the next paragraph of Tjanting, when we come upon the statement "Each
sentence accounts for all the rest, the "rhyme" of the sentences forces a
new perspective on the earlier form "Each sentence accounts for its
place." Minimally we observe that the particular "places" of "Each
sentence" are functionally integrated with "all the rest." Out of the
play of language emerges an idea of history as profoundly dialectical-as
dialectical as Silliman's textual presentation. The "past" is no more
fixed than the present or the future. All time is open to transformation.

Silliman's poem, in its largest sense, aims to represent through textual
enactment a redemption of the localities of human history. Marxist in its
orientation, Silliman's politicized writing has passed through the
filtering critique of the Frankfurt school, and especially through the
work of Benjamin. His Marxism is "Western" in the concrete sense that it
is carried out within the arena of advanced capitalism and American
political imperialism. His struggle against these exploitive social
formations appears as a critique of the modes of language which produce
and reproduce the "reality" of a capitalist world and history.

Silliman is especially interested, then, in that paradigmatic bourgeois
form of writing, the novel, along with those correspondent breezes
"referentiality" and "narrative." He does not attack "reference" in
language--all language is social--but that deformed and repressive form of
reference called referentiality wherein language is alienated from its
use-functions : "What happens when a language moves toward and passes
into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation
of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases In
its descriptive and narrative capabilities' ties, preconditions for the
invention of 'realism,' the optical illusion of reality in capitalist
thought. These developments are tied directly to the nature of reference
in language, which under capitalism is transformed (deformed) into
referentiality" (125) Silliman calls poetry "the philosophy of
praxis in language" because its procedures are performative,
"gestural," and nonnarrative. Poetics is, therefore, the critical
instance through which narrativized forms are to be understood. In every
novel is concealed its true poetic screaming to get out: "Repression does
not, fortunately, abolish the existence of the repressed element which
continues as a contradiction, often invisible, in the social fact. As
such, it continues to wage the class struggle of consciousness" (126).
But the novel, dominated as it is by referentiality and narrativity, is
always moving within the medium of its own self-occlusion. The function
of poetry is to provide an example of language in conscious pursuit of
complete self-transparency. At this particular juncture of late
capitalism, poetry represents the "social function of the language arts"
as a liberating rather than a repressive structure: "to carry out the
struggle for consciousness to the level of consciousness" (131).

Because "all meaning is a construct" (168), however, this
self-transparency of the word is not an idea or a priori form which the
poem tries to accommodate. Self-transparency, like social justice, is a
practical matter--a form of accomplishment rather than a form of truth.
It has to be carried out. In Silliman's writing, this "constructed"
procedure appears most frequently in his resort to various artificial
numbering systems to order his work. Two procedural rules govern the
form of Ketjak (1977), for example. First, the work moves by a series of
paragraphs in which each successive paragraph has twice the number of
sentences as the previous one. Second, each new paragraph must contain,
somewhere, all the words used in the preceding paragraph. The method is
designed to generate a network of accumulating and interconnecting
details. New material is continually being generated, but always within
the context of the body of materials which has already been developed.

Of Ketjak Bernstein has acutely noted that "the narrative rules are not
taken to be of intrinsic interest." Indeed, these are not "narrative
rules" at all, but generative ones. Furthermore, they do not occupy the
reader's attention as such, they provide the framework within which acts
of attention are carried out. Therefore Bernstein observes, in a
brilliant turn of critical wit, that "definition is a posteriori" in
Silliman's work, "arising from a poetic practice in which the reader is
is acknowledged as present counting. What counts are the multiple
perspectives processed through the text who takes part in that
processing. This is why Bernstein says that a Silliman poem is "not
reductive, participatory, multiple."

Yet in Tjanting, written four years after Ketjak, Silliman deployed a
numerically based rule for generating his materials which clearly held
something more than a procedural interest for him. The work, he has
said, grew out of a problem he had been pondering "for at least five
years: what would class struggle look like, viewed as a form. Would such
a form be useable in writing?" (27) The answer was that it would look
like the Fibonacci number series--that is to say, the series in which each
term is the sum of the preceding two. "What initially attracted me to the
series were three things: (1) it is the mathematical sequence most often
found in nature, (2) each succeeding term is larger, and (3) the
quantitative difference between terms is immediately perceptible, even
when the quantities are of syllables or paragraphs. 1121 Such a sequence
came to embody for Silliman an objectively based dialectical process:
"The most important aspect of the Fibonacci series turned out not to be
those gorgeous internal relationships, but the fact that it begins with
two ones. That not only permitted the parallel articulation of two
sequences of paragraphs, but also determined that their development would
be uneven, punning back to the general theory of class struggle. 1129 But
what must be noted is that Tjanting does not tell the/a "story" of "class
struggle." It does not reflect the operation of "the general theory of
class struggle" in a projected "fiction" (first-person or otherwise).
Rather Tjanting is a localized instance of class struggle itself: not
merely Silliman's personal act of struggle, but his deployment of an
artistic occasion within which such struggle may take place. In the end,
as Bernstein observed, it is the reader in the poem who "counts."

As with other writers, Silliman's work engages adversely with all that
means to appear authoritative, fixed, and determined. These antithetical
project functions within the world of language because language is taken
as the representative social form per se--the social form through which
society sees and presents itself to itself. Thus, the "languages" within
which these writers live and move and have their being are quite
specifically the "languages" of the Cold War west after the debacles of
the Korean and Vietnam wars. This is important to realize for it helps
to explain the extremity of their work. In them poetry appears at a
crisis of its traditional modes of expression. So false and
self-conflicted seem the ordinary public forms of discourse--in the media,
the policy organs of government, and the academic clerisy--that the
artistic representation of such discourse must either be subjected to
their one-dimensionality or activate a critical engagement.

That L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writers have chosen the alternative is clear not
only from their poetic practice, but from their theoretical and
exegetical work as well. Though they discuss and comment upon one
another's work quite frequently, these discussions almost never take the
form of "interpretation." Interpretive remarks are of course embedded
throughout the commentary, but they are subordinated to various types of
pragmatic and performative modes of discussion. As often as not the
"commentary" will take the form of another poem or poetical excursus, or
of an explanation of how some particular text "works" (rather than what
it "means"), or, as we have already noticed in the work of Tina Darragh
and Bernadette Mayer, of a set of directions and procedures, a
mini-course in how-to-write.

THE SPECIAL CHARACTER of Silliman's nonnarrative texts is nicely
dramatized if we set a work like Tjanting beside an academic text like
John Hollander's Reflections on Espionage (1976). This may seem an odd
comparison, but it is in fact quite opposite. In the first place, both
poems are fully conscious of their placement within the sociohistorical
field of Cold War America. Correlatively, both imagine and reflect upon
the function of poetry within such social circumstances. Finally, both
resort--in an extraordinarily odd conjunction of purposes--to the
Fibonacci number sequence as an important procedural device within which their
poems' meanings are carried out. "Reflections on Espionage" is a
narrativized text made up of a series of code messages sent by the spy Cupcake
to various other persons in his espionage network. The poem tells the story of
Cupcake's increasing psychic disaffection-partly concealed even from himself
with his work as a spy. Eventually Cupcake comes under the surveillance of his
own organization's internal security apparatus, and at the end--his
reliability as a spy hopelessly compromised--the organization calls for
his "termination."

The story involves, of course, an elaborately executed allegory in which
"spying" is equated with "being a poet," and vice versa. The text is
full of coded references to American poets and writers, mostly
Hollander's contemporaries. Its distant progenitor, Browning's "How It
Strikes a Contemporary," underscores by contrast the special character of
Reflections, for Hollander's story--like his hero--is dominated by
nostalgia and a pervasive sense of social anomie. The poem's world is
graphed along an axis of "them" and "us" which reflects both the
political situation of the Cold War and the typical antagonisms and
divisions between "schools" or groups of poets. All this would be merely
amusing were it not that Hollander's hero continually reflects upon the
social function of poetry; from these reflections he draws the most
mordant and disheartening conclusions. In fact, "Reflections" argues, or
rather demonstrates, that poetry under the social circumstances
"reflected" in this poem has, like spying under the same circumstances,
only an alienating effect. This poetry of "reflection" preserves, and
ultimately relies, the world-as-alienation, and it does so by failing to
imagine that poetry might struggle with, rather than merely reflect
(upon), its world.

Cupcake's meditations on his work as spy/poet lead him to a sharp sense
of his own isolation. In his loneliness he calls into question the whole
enterprise to which he has given himself:

What kind of work is this
For which if we were to touch in the darkness
It would be without feeling the other there?
It might help to know if Steampump's dying
Was part of the work or not. I shall not be
Told, I know.

Cupcake's question is rhetorical and will not--cannot, in his imagination
of the world--be answered. This social alienation mirrors a correspondent
crisis of the personality.

Names like ours leave no traces in
Nature. Yet what of the names they encode, names
One's face comes in time to rhyme with, John or James?
The secret coded poem of one's whole life rhymes
Entirely with that face, a maddening
Canzona, every line of which sings in the
Breaths we take and give, ending with the same sound.
As with the life, so ridiculously, with
The work. But, after all, which of them is the
Enciphered version of the other one, and
Are we, after all, even supposed to know?

In the end Hollander's "master spy" will watch the system he has served
send out a broadcast order for his execution. His final coded
transmission is a frightening poem constructed partly on the use of the
Fibonacci number series. Its principal message, secreted away in the
poem's initial and terminal syllables, is revealed by using the Fibonacci
number sequence as an index to those syllables. It is a plea for death,
and it is answered in the poem's final line--a series of Xs which,
decoded, translate: TERMINATE CUPCAKE.

Silliman's imagination, as we have seen, found in the Fibonacci numbers
an image of class struggle and social dialectics. The numbers confirm
his search for signs and modes of social dynamism. But when Cupcake uses
the Fibonacci series in his final transmission, he interprets his own
usage in these terrible terms:

and I have sat watching
Key numbers in their serial dance growing
Further apart, outdistancing their touching,
Outstretched arms.

Hollander's alter-ego "editor" of Cupcake's story supplies a gloss to
Cupcake's final transmission. The exegesis remarks on the desperation of
the passage but can only replicate the master spy's own sense of
helplessness:

This disturbing and disturbed transmission seems to be a kind of cry for
help. But to whom?

The interpretation here is congruent with the poem's self-conception.
Hollander characterizes Cold War America and its poetry as a world of
desperate (rather than rich) ambiguities. It is a poetic world whose own
highest value--close interpersonal relations--is contradicted by the
social structures and practices it takes for granted. To Hollander, the march
of the Fibonacci numbers is the apocalypse of such a world, the prophecy
of its desperation and its even more fragmented future.

Hollander's poem imagines what it knows (or thinks it knows) about poetry
and society alike. Such an imagination, however, can mount no effective
resistance against its own terrible revelations: vacancy in luxurious
words, dismemberment in the way we live now. It is all mirror and
meditation, a story and a set of reflections on the story. In this
respect the contrast with writers like Bernstein and Silliman is striking
and unmistakable. In them antinarrative and nonnarrative continually
work against and move beyond the enchantments of what has been given and
what is taken to be "real." They are the inheritors of Blake's early
attempts to dismantle those prisons of imaginary beauties: social and
personal life in its cruel apparitions, and art as what reflects upon
such things. Hollander's poem is a work of decadence in that it rcfuses
to press the charges called for by its own investigation. Pleading "no
contest," it is properly found guilty. "Reflections on Espionage" is
anything but a trivial poem, however. Its analogues are, for example,
Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat and Rossetti's House of Life and all those works
which deliver us over to luxurious and unlivable things. The highest
form of such poetry is reached in the work of artists like Baudelaire,
the mayor of the City of Pain, over whose gates is written the legend
"Anywhere out of the World."

Poetry can and does offer alternatives to such desperate forms of
idealism, however. I do not have in mind work which celebrates or
reflects the "solidarity" of "postmodern bourgeois intellectuals," though
we certainly have a great deal of that today. Charles Bernstein's "For
Love has such a Spirit . . ." is too long to quote in full, or even at
length, but it certainly represents such an alternative: a Shelleyan
performance, not unlike "Epipsychidion" or the great "Life of Life"
lyric, in which love burns through all the vests which seem to hide it
from us.

For love I would-deft equator.
Nonchalant attribution of all the, & filled with
such, meddles with & steals my constancy, sharpening desire for that, in
passing, there, be favorite in ordinary, but no sooner thought than gone.
My heart seems wax, that like tapers burns at light.31

This is a "deconstructive" poetry, fully postmodern in its style, but in
its nervous erosions it moves the "Spirit" of a love that, settled in
what is "ordinary" and given, will not settle for anything.

Silliman's nonnarratives are also exemplary alternatives, and a number of
other significant writers might be named: Alan Davies, Lyn Hejinian,
Susan Howe. They are all distinctive and distinguished writers. In each
of them, however, writing is used to contest and disrupt those forms of
order which are always replicated in the "realism" deployed through
narrativities. These disruptions take antinarrative as well as
nonnarrative form. In the latter, however, the critique of fixed orders
("reality") is carried out simultaneously with the deployment of new
orders and "realities": "The mind evolves a blueprint out of what is
already there, doesn't recognize where to go next, then explores and
enumerates the possibilities ... The odd connection permits a
reexperience of what was originally recorded but not really experienced.
The mind (language) reshuffles its fragments in order to attain the
original hierarchy; reassembling it permits reprocessing from the new
perspective." (1132) This might have been a specific commentary on
Silliman's Tjanting, for the process sketched here is precisely what we
discover in Silliman's poem. But Davies and Plombino are making a
general statement about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing. It is well put. And
though it does not talk directly of a "politics of poetry," the politics
of such writing--the theory and the practice of it alike--are plain for
anyone to see.